The Beginning
The following is taken from the White Wolf book of Exalted Second Edition, pg 22-25 Essence This is truth: The world is a great field of energy known as Essence. This Essence pervades all things, composes all things and controls all things. It is often called "breath," but it forms not only the respired medium of life, but also the physical material of that life. Essence is the wall of structure that maintains Creation and Essence is the swirling insanity that lies beyond it. Every creature is inseparably linked to Essence. When immortal, beings who can control and channel Essence are called gods. When mortal, they are named Exalted. The Primordials In the beginning, there was raw Essence, existing in constant swirling chaos, unshaped and unformed. Within this chaos existed the Primodials. It cannot be known whether they were born from the Essence, if they predated its existence, or if they were somehow coterminus with it, but they were the first of all shaped things. In the madness around them dwelt the Fair Folk, creatures whose very nature was antagonistic to the Primordials and all that sprang from them. The Primordials warred with the Fair Folk and matters have not changed since the first days of the world. Even today, the faerie seek to burn away all Creation and return the Wyld to the formless purity of the time before shape. What they made The Primordials desired a place for themselves, so that they might shelter from the endless storm of chaos and the tiresome warrings of the Fair Folk. There, they would rest from the struggles of existence in the Wyld and play their Games of Divinity. From this thought and their united will sprang Creation. They gave shape and form to the world, from the sun in the skies to the tiniest ant in the dust. And when the Primordials saw that it was sound and safe and suitable to their desires, they settled down to play the Games. Creation was too complicated to maintain or sustain itself, however, and their games did not permit long lapses of attention. Therefore, the Primordials created the gods to protect and maintain Creation, leaving it in their charge. What Came After In time, the gods grew discontent at their slavery. They could raise no hand against their creators, however, so they empowered mere mortals to be both their weapons and their champions. These chosen mortals, these Exalted, then rose up and made war against the Primordials on the gods' behalf. Stife wracked Creation, and many things were destroyed that would not be made again. The five great elementals were unmade by the Primordials lest they should serve as a weapon against them. The pre-human race of the Dragon Kings died by the millions, and those who survived had no choice but to retreat into a techno-magical state of torpor until a future Age. After years of battle, the Primordials were defeated. Some were slain, and beneath them yawned a horrid Abyss that swallowed their dying souls. Others surrendered, lest they too fall into the Abyss. At the intercession of Gaia - the only Primordial who sided with the Exalted - these defeated primordials were spared execution. Instead, they were forced to swear powerful oaths on their very names, which banished them Elsewhere and imprisoned them within the body of their general, Malfeas. Those Primordials who died became known as the Neverborn. They were too vast to pass into nothingness, and the rules of the cycle of reincarnation they had created for mortals did not apply to them, so they lingered on the doorstep of exitence. Their collapse into the Abyss damaged the cycle of reincarnation, however, and polluted much of the Essence with which they had formed Creation. This polluted Essence abscessed and congealed into a parallel plane of existance that is now known as the Underwolrd. In time, this necrotic Essence even began to seep into Creation itself. And hardly had the Neverborn begun their endless, dream slumber in their vast subterranean tombs than a portion of the spirits of other creatures that had died began to filter into their grey new world as well, rather than obeying the rules of the cycle of reincarnation. Those primordials who were taken captive became known as the Yozis, or demons. Yet hardly had the gods locked these demons away, when they began to dream of escape and revenge. They produced races of offspring to serve and amuse them in their imprisonment. Yet in their defeat, all the Primordials cursed the gods, the Exalted who served them and the Creation that housed them all. Their curses were as true and wicked as the curses of a creator betrayed by her own connivings always are, but such matters were of little concern to the exalted and the gods. After all, the Neverborn and the Yozis were merely the shades of foes already defeated. Ghosts were ignored as a curious echo of the war against the Primordials, while the Yozis' demon offspring were summoned and harnessed in sorcerous servitude for their might and used to build public works and palaces. In the days after the Primordial War, a body known as the Solar Deliberative was founded as a council where all Exalted might have a voice. Its purpose was to provide a collective defense and to help decide the future of Creation. In these early years, the Celestial gods passed Creation into the control of the Exalted, and a golden age of peace and prosperity reigned throughout the world. The Solars ruled, the Lunars were their warlords and mates, the Sidereals advised them and planned the future, and the Terrestrial Exalted served in a great bureaucracy. The gods and elementals obeyed their orders, and great works of art and sorcery were created - wonders of a magnitude that shall likely never be seen again. This was the First Age of Creation, and it was a time of miracles beyond description. The sorcerous might of the Exalted knew no limit. Armies expanded the borders of the world itself. Cities flew through the sky on Essence engines. Little did those who lived at that time think of the foes they had defeated, so secretly did the curse of the Primordials grow within their souls. The Great Curse Matures The Primordials' curse fell first upon the Exalted, and not the gods. It grew unrecognised in their hearts like a sickness, warping virtue to excess and magnifying natural faults. Valour became vainglory and rivalry, honour became rigidity, compassion became corruption, and the Solar Exalted turned to tyranny, cruelty and malice. The Great Curse lay on the other exalted as well, but most heavily on the Solar Exalted, as they were the leaders who had brough down the Primordials. Eventually, the Solar Exalted turned from the guidance of the Unconquered Sun, their patron and the invincible chieftain of the gods. In turn, he averted his face from them. The Sidereals saw that their masters were turning to evil, so they took counsel with each other. They peered into the Loom of Fate and saw there three alternatives for Creation. In the first, they did nothing, which resulted in the corruption and downfall of the whole world. In the second, they attempted to reason with and restore the Solars, which might or might not save Creation. In the third, they guided the Dragon-Blooded to seize power and to wipe the Solars utterly from the face of the world. That act would surely preserve the world, if only in a considerably diminished form. They chose the third option. At the subtle behest of the Sidereals, the Dragon-Blooded came to believe thta they had no choice but to slay their Solar masters and replace them. In secret they laid their schemes, then attacked by surprise while the Solars were at a great banquet, slaughtering many on the spot and managing to separate the others from their resources and seats of power. The Lunars who had already grown troubled by the Solars' excesses, were not as vigorous in their defense as they might have been. Some Lunars were slain, some fled into the far reaches of Creation, and the rest retreated into the Wyld beyond the elemental poles. Despite their great skill and powers, teh Solars who survived the initial ambush fell one by one. As they died, the portions of their souls that the Unconquered Sun had empowered were whisked into the cycle of reincarnation so that new Solars could be Exalted. To prevent this - and forestall an otherwise eternal war - certain Sidereal Exalted used powerful magics to coerce those portions of the Solars' souls into an apparatus called the Jade Prison. The Dragon-Blooded then sank this enormous structure into the depths of the Inland Sea to lock the Solars away forever. A tiny handful of Solar Essences remained free and continued to reincarnate when the prison was sealed, but on the whole, Creation was purged of the Solar Exalted - making way for the rule of the Dragon-Blooded. Seeking to simplify matters for their Terrestrial pawns the Sidereal Exalted vanished from sight through the use of prodigious magic, obliterating all knowledge of themselves from history and the stars. With the Solars overthrown, the Lunars in fugitive exile and the Sidereals occulted behind eldritch misdirection, the Age of the Celestial Exalted came to an apparent end. The Terrestrials then rewrote history to cast the Solar and Lunar Exalted as diabolical Anathema who had been mad with power and in league with demons. Those who had witnessed or suffered from the excesses of the Solar Exalted raised no objection to this comfortable lie. The Shogunate The Terrestrial Exalted now ruled in the Solars' place, establishing a Shogunate in place of the Deliberative. Yet as year followed year, the glories forged in the First Age failed and could ont be replaced. For century upon century, Dragon-Blood fought Dragon-Blood for dwindling magical weapons and resources, hiding the true reasons for their conflicts behind ideologies of leaders long since lost to history. Trhoughout this era, a loose confederacy of warring daimyos ruled Creation, periodically united by a strong shogun until the next disputed succession or palace coup. It was a time of growing unrest and declining standards of living. The Terrestrials were unequal to the challenge of maintaining the wonders of the First Age - those that had not already been destroyed, sabotaged by the Twilight Caste Solars or hidden by the Sidereals. The borders of an expanded Creation shuddered. The armies of the Fair Folk breached the boundaries of reality, sowing chaos in terrible breakthroughs. Finally, having grown mighty in their centuries of Underworld exile, the Deathlords showed their hand. These creatures of black power joined their might to conjure a vast, sorcerous disease into Creation. The Great Contagion, as it was known, struck the world like a hammer, slaying nine out of every ten individuals in Creation, and the dead flooded the Underworld to swell the armies of the Deathlords. By the time the Contagion abated, so many had died that great holes had been torn in the fabric of Creation itself, pooling into gloomy shadowlands where Creation and the Underworld overlapped. The Fair Folk eagerly seized their opportunity and set upon Creation in its hour of greatest desperation. Shadowlands grew and swelled in the heart of the world, the Wyld ate at the borders of Creation, and it seemed that all might be destroyed. In the midst of this chaos, as the world spiraled to a cataclysmic end in a welter of plague and faerie-fire, one soldier managed to win her way to the ancient seat of the defenses that protected Creation. There, at the heart of the world's power, she activated those defenses and became their master. Category:Campaign Setting